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Question

I’m working on a program that will be processing files that could potentially be 100GB or more in size. The files contain sets of variable length records. I’ve got a first implementation up and running and am now looking towards improving performance, particularly at doing I/O more efficiently since the input file gets scanned many times.

Is there a rule of thumb for using mmap() versus reading in blocks via C++'s fstream library? What I’d like to do is read large blocks from disk into a buffer, process complete records from the buffer, and then read more.

The mmap() code could potentially get very messy since mmap’d blocks need to lie on page sized boundaries (my understanding) and records could potentially like across page boundaries. With fstreams, I can just seek to the start of a record and begin reading again, since we’re not limited to reading blocks that lie on page sized boundaries.

How can I decide between these two options without actually writing up a complete implementation first? Any rules of thumb (e.g., mmap() is 2x faster) or simple tests?

本贴涉及的硬件平台是X86，如果是其它平台，嘻嘻，不保证能一一对号入座，但是举一反三，我想是完全可行的。

概念

物理地址(physical address)

用于内存芯片级的单元寻址，与处理器和CPU连接的地址总线相对应。
——这个概念应该是这几个概念中最好理解的一个，但是值得一提的是，虽然可以直接把物理地址理解成插在机器上那根内存本身，把内存看成一个从0字节一直到最大空量逐字节的编号的大数组，然后把这个数组叫做物理地址，但是事实上，这只是一个硬件提供给软件的抽像，内存的寻址方式并不是这样。所以，说它是“与地址总线相对应”，是更贴切一些，不过抛开对物理内存寻址方式的考虑，直接把物理地址与物理的内存一一对应，也是可以接受的。也许错误的理解更利于形而上的抽像。